In The Dying Animal, Philip Roth’s sequel to The Breast, the author’s thinly veiled stand-in Professor Kepesh says of the gorgeous co-ed he is sleeping with:
These girls with old gents don’t do it despite the age – they’re drawn to the age, they do it for the age. Why? In Consuela’s case, because the vast difference in age gives her permission to submit, I think. My age and my status give her, rationally, the license to surrender, and surrendering in bed is a not unpleasant sensation.
In Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, gorgeous CEO Romy (Nicole Kidman) can only have permission to submit in the face of the greatest peril imaginable: a #MeToo scandal. And yet Babygirl is not the dull and decorous #MeToo dreck of the last few years (such as the astonishingly dull The Assistant and ploddingly sanctimonious She Said). The workplace misconduct here, by contrast, is too hot to handle: intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) looks so alluring that you can understand why someone might just throw everything away to get in bed with him. She’s not the one in power, he explains to her: he could ruin her life with one phone call.
So it’s not just about his looks – it’s about that very threat, and the way he acts from the moment Romy first sees him. Samuel miraculously saves her from being mauled by a German Shepherd that’s inexplicably been left alone off-leash on a crowded Midtown sidewalk (along which she, the CEO of Amazon stand-in “Tensile Automation”, is inexplicably walking to work). He demeans her with shocking frankness from the start – unlike her husband Jacob, who just affably ribs her while she prepares the kids breakfast in the breakfast nook of their sprawling Colonial (they inexplicably seem to not have a nanny).
It’s not that the husband’s unattractive – he is played by Antonio Banderas, after all, one of the most desired “Latin lovers” of modern cinema. He’s smart, loyal, ripped, a great father to their children. He’s even creative, spending the film directing an innovative production of Hedda Gabler (though he does at what point, in what I hope is supposed to be a joke, exclaim “It’s about suicide, not desire!”). The problem, though, is simply that – despite his perfectly respectable efforts – he cannot satisfy her in bed.
The gender-swapped version of this film would, it goes without saying, be so obviously evil that it would be banal: you’re telling me the CEO doesn’t like his wife in bed so he sleeps with the intern?
But wait: is this film banal, too? Romy is portrayed as such a flitty airhead that it’s hard to see her as a halfway coherent character, let alone care about her dilemma. She has no convincing intimacy with her family (or even distance from them); she’s just an outrageously beautiful woman posed in a beautiful house. Nor does she have any apparent responsibilities at work, let alone a life outside of it. Samuel certainly looks nice, but it’s completely unexplained how or why he’s interning at this company (to begin with, he doesn’t seem to have ever been in school). Both characters are nothing more than their affair, heavy-handed back/sob stories aside; they seem to have the most superficial attachment to the reality around them. Kidman amps up the breathy girlishness; even when Romy acts the CEO, she seems to barely know what her next line is. Dickinson, meanwhile, resumes the tight-lipped masculinity of his memorable debut in Beach Rats.
All that is real here is their fetish, which is presented as completely immutable and deserving – demanding – the utmost respect. When Romy tells Jacob about her need to be in danger to feel desire, he yells at her about how selfish it was to risk their family for this; and when, in a violent confrontation that quickly peters into ice bags and talking, he tells her that the relationship with Samuel is based on a “male fantasy” of a powerful woman’s submission, Samuel interjects that that’s an “outdated idea”. Sexual exploration is still synonymous with self-discovery.
But there is something new here: a total cynicism about the post-#MeToo workplace. All anyone seems to do at Tensile is record videos about the company; in the first half of the film, these are vacuous, buzzword-salad about replacing warehouse workers with robots, and in the second half of the film, these are even more vacuous videos about the company’s DEI commitments. At one point, an aide reminds Romy that “being vulnerable is good now,” and she nods thoughtfully. The frisson of their affair derives from its secrecy, and once information begins to leak out, everyone at the workplace races to extract as much personal gain as possible from it. Chief among these conspirators is Esme (Sophie Wilde), Romy’s young assistant who seems to do nothing besides ask Romy about the promotion of young women at the company. Samuel begins dating her, causing Romy to spiral into jealousy and despair (though he reassures her Esme doesn’t share their kink). And in the end, it turns out, Esme knows. She’s not trying to blackmail her, she assures Romy; she just wants her to “do better.” “You’re confusing morality with ambition,” Romy counters without a beat. Well, who cares? She still gets the promotion.
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